


Installation of System Preferences

by GoldStarGrl



Category: Silicon Valley (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, Origin Story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-13
Updated: 2018-05-13
Packaged: 2019-05-06 05:20:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14634924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/GoldStarGrl/pseuds/GoldStarGrl
Summary: When Gavin is seven years old, he can do algebra.





	Installation of System Preferences

**Author's Note:**

> This was a commission for the wonderful dmajor7th! Contact me on tumblr at hgedits of you're interested in a similar transaction.

**i.**

When Gavin is seven years old, he can do algebra.  

At first, his parents just think it's a party trick. “Okay Gav, what’s 5 - x = -19?” his mother says, and then holds up her hands expectantly, as everyone in the room watches him with eager, lifted eyebrows. “What’s 16 multiplied by x = 112?”

“Twenty four,” he says almost immediately. “Seven,” and the room erupts with _oohs_ and scattered applause from his parents’ friends. A few playfully accuse the Belsons of teaching their only child to memorize a few choice equations, but quiet when Gavin answers their own tossed out math problems correctly.

“We’re not doing anything, I swear,” his father says again and again, with a tight smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “He just does that.”

Gavin is usually sent to bed soon after, but he lies awake for hours, listening to the clink of wine glasses and the murmur of the salon set downstairs. Thinking about how they stared at him with rapt attention, with awe.

He loves the attention. He _loves_ it.

 

**ii.**

Gavin is not just excellent at math, he’s also great at science and rudimentary engineering and will read anything he can find on Turing machines. He really likes Alan Turing, gets a funny feeling in his stomach one night when he’s thirteen and reads a short passage in a book about how Turing was a _known homosexual._ That he liked _boys_ and kissed _boys_ and when people found out it ruined everything, all he had worked for, everyone who respected him.

He shoves the book under his bed without finishing it, something he’s never done before in his life.

 

**iii.**

He goes to college young, sixteen. Not young enough to be of particular note – he’s not _graduating_ at sixteen, that’d be really impressive – but enough that he doesn’t quite fit in with the rest of the freshman. When his Intro to Electrical Engineering class goes on a weekend trip to see the new IBM campus, which had just made a massive move from Texas to Palo Alto, he has to get a permission slip signed by his _mom._

So he spends most of his time alone. He buys a Commodore 64 and takes it apart out of sheer curiosity. He mildly electrocutes himself trying to put it back together, and for the rest of his life he can’t feel his hands and feet very well. He spends his seventeenth birthday wandering the streets of Stanford, spending all night in a tea shop run by Japanese immigrants and becomes obsessed with Buddhism after seeing the prayer shrine they’ve erected in the corner of the store.

He cannot learn how to drive. He crashes his mother’s sudan into the brick wall in front of their house twice. He goes to the eye doctor and comes back with perfect vision. On his third test the administrator from the California DMV actually makes him take a breathalyzer, and then reports, amazed, that he’s never seen anyone operate a car like this when sober.

“I want to make a self-driving car,” he announces when he gets back to his dorm room after Unsuccessful Attempt Number Five. He is completely serious. His sophomore roommate, a twenty-year-old from Nebraska, chokes on his soda from laughing. Gavin storms out and puts in a request for a single room, where he lives for the rest of college.

 

**iv.**

Peter Gregory is three years older than Gavin and dropped out of Stanford before he had even unpacked. Gavin hears his name bandied around the budding computer science department for a few weeks anyway. People say he’s a genius. People say he’s working on revolutionizing ARPANET, on making ARPANET obsolete, at sending people to goddamn Mars.

The rumors get a little nuts after awhile. Nerds in a basement working themselves up, a tale as old as time.

Gavin sees him in his favorite tea shop for the first time, in a corduroy blazer that doesn’t hang quite right on him, hunched over pages and pages of notes. He has a lazer-focus in his eyes that Gavin recognizes. He sees it in the bathroom mirror when he stumbles home from the library at four in the morning, head still racing with ideas and ambition and _plans._

Peter has brown eyes. Gavin usually doesn’t notice that sort of thing.

He takes a deep breath, wipes his hands on his jeans, and sits down hard on the chair opposite Peter.

“What are you working on?” He asks.

 

**v.**

The worst part about starting a company when you're twenty? You can’t even get a drink to celebrate.

“Pete, just one six pack. You’re not even doing anything illegal,” he asks plaintively – Gavin Belson does not _beg_ – almost bouncing in the passenger’s seat of Peter’s car. It’s an incredibly unattractive station wagon, but at least he _can_ drive it. Besides, if the amount of seed money they got for their VGA graphics cards idea is any indication of things to come, Gavin is sure he can convince Peter to upgrade to something more stylish.

“I would be buying alcohol for a minor, that’s illegal,” Peter says, eyes on the road as they leave the VC’s offices, heading back towards Peter’s apartment on the Bay.

“But I’m a serious innovator now, and I need to learn to hold my alcohol for all the parties we’re going to be invited to,” Gavin says. He knows Peter, and even himself, need liquid courage when it comes to parties, meeting new people. He’s still getting used to the feeling of people _wanting_ him in the room, a hit of that glorious attention from his childhood about a thousand times more strong. “Besides, you love me.”

They slow to a stop at the intersection, the light overhead turning red. “Yes, I suppose I do.”

And Peter leans over the divider and presses his lips against Gavin’s. After a few seconds, the light turns green and Peter breaks away, turning back to the road like he’d done nothing more than bump Gavin’s shoulder.

Gavin’s never kissed anybody before.  

Unconsciously, he reaches up and touches his lips with his index and middle fingers. They’re tingling, even though he glances in the side mirror and sees he looks exactly the same as he did before.

He doesn’t want to kiss anybody else but Peter, ever again, for the rest of his life.

He drops his hand and grabs Peter’s off his grip on the wheel. Peter silently laces their fingers together and turns pink.

 

**vi.**

Gavin, it turns out, does beg on occasion.

When he’s flat on his back on the carpet of his brand new office, the office seed money bought and Gavin finds himself eternally grateful for, because he can’t imagine doing _this_ on the ground in Peter’s mom’s garage. He begs Peter to just fuck him already, because he’s twenty-one and he should’ve done this by now (“I’m twenty-four, you’re already ahead of me,” Peter says. As usual, he’s impervious to the embarrassment that threatens to swallow Gavin whole.) and then begs him not to stop once all their inexperienced fumbling with condoms and angles has worked itself into something _new_ and _alien_ and _extremely nice._

Gavin also begs when Peter refuses to listen to reason.

When he doesn’t want to take on any investors they possibly can, when he turns down buyout offers in the billions. “We can always build something new, we can pivot to something better,” he pleads, following Peter around their apartment.

“I refuse to sacrifice innovation in the name of corporate prestige.”

“ _What does that even mean?”_

Gavin refuses to beg when he and Peter fracture.

When their apartment becomes only his apartment again, and Peter’s button-ups and whirling black servers are packed tight in boxes, and Peter won’t look at him, won’t speak to him.

But Gavin thinks it all. _I love you. I love you, please don’t leave. Please don’t leave me here alone._

But Peter does, and Gavin is glad he didn’t beg this time. He’s old enough to buy his own booze now, and he spends the whole night sitting on his fire escape, drinking wine straight from the bottle and planning what’s next, what’s bigger and better than Peter and their work and their love.

No. Not their love. He doesn’t love anything but himself. Love will destroy everything, like it destroyed Alan Turing and it destroyed Gavin’s company and he is not going to let it take him down too.

_Hooli is a cool name,_ he decides as he finished the bottle.

 

**vii.**

When Gavin is forty-five years old, he can’t do algebra.

Okay, Gav. Peter Gregory is dead. Subtract the only person in the world who understood your brain, your moods and mania and ideas from _x,_ and it comes to a billion dollars, a three thousand person workforce who are all terrified of you, and an enormous glass office with one chair, you always did need a single room.

Does he solve for _x_? He is _x_?

He stalks down to Hooli Hanger B, where tests on the self-driving cars are underway. He knows they still have an emergency manual switch, for engineers to press and take control of the wheel in the event of a glitch.

He gets into the nearest model, ignoring the stunned, confused whispers of his lackeys, disables the AI program, and drives the car directly into the styrofoam walls they’ve set up to stimulate buildings.

He gets out without shifting into park – he never remembers – and three Hooli employees scurry after the car as it continues to roll slowly against the faux-building.

“Fix it,” he barks, and walks out, making it all the way to the hallway before the tears come.

 


End file.
